I recently purchased a netbook and noticed that loading my database takes 10 seconds compared to one second on my 5 year old laptop. I got the same speed on two other netbooks. This wouldn't be so bad, but every time I close a record, the database is re-loaded (another 10 seconds). I tried placing the database on a ram disk but it still took a long time to load. It’s hard to believe, but my new netbook loads the database slower than my Palm T5!

Is there a way to speed this up? Do I need more ram? A faster hard drive? A faster CPU? Does HanDBdase Desktop make a temp file? Should that be on a ram disk? And if so, how do you change the path to the temp file?

Wow, what a difference in speed between your new netbook and your old laptop. I've heard that a Netbook is underpowered for any real computer power, but this is a bit beyond that I'd think!

In terms of the difference between your desktop and your handheld speeds- the handheld is something we knew was slow, so we only load the current viewable screen of records at a time for speed. On the desktop, where processing power and screen real estate are more plentiful, we load the entire database into the table view at once. There are two reasons we do this- one is that the scrolling is much faster and smoother, and the other is that we can word wrap and adjust the height of each column by doing this as well. So that's why your old Palm device appears faster with HanDBase!

In terms of speeding things up, there are a few sources of slowdown in the list view load. The first is the use of relationship fields. Each one of those requires an extra lookup and while HanDBase 4 does caching and such to improve performance of them, a lot of records and a slow device can still be pretty slow. You can alleviate this quickly by select the list view width to 0 pixels or 0%. Then the lookup is not performed and the performance improvement should be great.

Another source of this is the use of image fields. If you have those let me know.

Let me know if either of the above apply to your database. How many records do you have in the database as well?

I created a view where the "Note" field is not visible (effectively eliminating the netbook CPU working on word-wraps/column height adjustments for all of the records) and now the database loads in less than a second. When I switch back to a view where the memo field is visible, it takes over 10 seconds again.

Is there a way to disable the word-wrap/auto-column height feature on the desktop version?

Just for a comparison test, I exported all of my records to MS Access 2000. In Access, the list view is instantaneous, but it doesn’t auto-adjust the column height. So this must be the issue.

There is not currently an option for this, but it's a great suggestion for the future. I've actually been trying to figure out how I can implement dynamic loading like I do on most handheld versions which will likely involve a fixed or max height of each column. But nothing at this point- all planned for the future!